


clair de lune

by TolkienGirl



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Cellar Floor Convos, Episode: s01e19 Miss Mystic Falls, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 10:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19207492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: She could mean anything.





	clair de lune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MJosephine10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MJosephine10/gifts), [catefrankie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/catefrankie/gifts).



The problem of Elena Gilbert is hardly distilled to purple silk—if it even _is_ silk, which Damon doubts, in this polyester age. Nonetheless, in the moment of her descent, he felt one of those blistering rushes of white heat to throat and chest, and some thought of _angel_ , woefully unsuited to his destiny of cold blood.

 _Her_ blood wasn’t cold when she took down Stefan. She and her blood and her tears run hot—hotter, Damon believes, than the rest of the food-tier humans.

Sometimes he’s tired of thinking about humans as food.

Sometimes he wishes Katherine had left him to be buried in a pauper’s grave, neck open.

That doesn’t make her any less gone.

“So did you have to practice?”

Elena’s voice, close in the soil-rich cellar space, is a bit husky.

The tears again, of course.

“Practice?” She could mean anything—showing his fangs to the mirror, snapping bones, looking like he isn’t in love.

 _She_ could mean _anything_.

“Hmm?” Best to be noncommittal.

“The dance.” Elena heaves a deep sigh, which lends a dangerous delicacy to her collarbones. “I can’t remember my tap routine from third grade. I think it’s been a little longer since you.  You know.”

“Oh, I’m a natural,” he says, not really bluffing. “Different song, but...” _Same girl, yet not_. “Same rhythm. When you don’t have Carol Lockwood”—he says the name with the appropriate rolling derision—“Shouting directions, it’s not too hard to grasp.”

“It meant a lot,” Elena says. “I know I...I mean, I don’t care about the dress or the dance or any of the high-school stuff, not with...”

His brother looms large even when he isn’t there.

“But,” Elena rallies, “it was nice of you to step up. It made me care for a minute.”

 _Me too. For much more than a minute_.

“About the dance,” she adds, rolling her eyes, and he wonders what his face looked like.

“You are in those fleeting years of youth,” Damon observes flatly, before he can let her correction hurt. “You’re duty-bound to enjoy them.”

She’s seventeen. He’s pushing two-hundred. And he wasn’t seventeen when his life ended, and she won’t ever know, in her human life, what grief and malice and anger do when they’ve gathered dust for decades.

He’s as much a monster to think himself...inclined to her, as he is to chow down on the bar-crawl crowd.

“Not duty-bound.” Elena rests the palm of her hand on the ground beside her, as if she doesn’t mind the filth she touches. “I can’t be duty-bound to have fun. That’s—too shallow and too important all at once.”

“You came to the right place for killjoy, that’s for sure.” He smiles, just a little lithe thing that she might easily miss in the dark.

“He’s going to be so angry when he wakes up. At himself.”

“He should be.”

“ _Damon_.”

He still wishes, after months of knowing her, that there wasn’t such power in the way she says his name. “He screwed up, Elena. Isn’t remorse what you want? From him?”

Now _she’s_ staring hard at him, in the dark, and he can see it because he has vampire eyesight he can map every delicate frownline.

“Yes,” Elena says at last. “I like to see human emotions from both of you.”

If his brother is in any state of wakefulness, on the far side of that bolted door, Damon wonders what this all sounds like to him.

“You always bring out the dead in me,” he snarks, just in case.

It’s not what he means at all.


End file.
